Parents: F.E. And Mary E. Smith
Beating the odds in Izee
A tale of tough times and a tough ranch family who survived them
By Jack Southworth
For the Blue Mountain Eagle 10/1/2009
IZEE - Things aren't all that bright for Grant County's economy right now with mills shutting down and an unemployment rate that's among the highest in the state. But if you think things are tough now, you haven't heard about the late Pat Smith, and how he and his wife, Greta, started off with almost nothing in the 1930s and ended up with a 250-cow outfit out in Izee.
Edgar Poe "Pat" Smith was born at Fossil in 1901 and raised on a wheat ranch near Mayville. After graduating from Wheeler County High School in Fossil, Pat worked on the family ranch for several years. He had seven brothers and three sisters.
"There were too many boys for too small a place so I had to find a way to make a living elsewhere," he said.
Pat married Greta McRae in 1925. Two years younger than Pat, she had grown up near Fossil and they had been in high school together. After high school, Greta had taught school at Badger (north of Mayville) for a few years. They were an odd couple to look at: Pat was almost 6-foot and solidly built. Greta was only 5-feet-tall and thin. He was gruff, taciturn and short-tempered; she was talkative and friendly. What they shared was a passion for hard work and a willingness in the early years on the ranch to sacrifice pleasures in the present for a better future.
Pat and Greta owned and operated a store in Condon for a while and then went to California, where Pat worked in the oil fields. The Depression cost him that job so in 1933 they moved to Izee and took over a small place that Pat's sister, Pearl, and her husband, Rollo Johnson, had operated. The ranch was up Poison Creek above John Hyde's original homestead, and Rollo and Pearl had gone broke on the place and abandoned it. When Pat and Greta moved there in 1933 they had a team of draft horses, a milk cow, a few head of beef cows and a couple of saddle horses.
In 2000, when Pat was 99, I visited him at a nursing home in Condon. I asked if he and Greta had bought the place from Pearl and Rollo. Still sharp of mind, he leaned toward me and says, "You don't get it do you? They went broke. They walked away from the place with nothing. We moved in with nothing and we were there three years before we could pay the back taxes and get the deed to the place. The first two winters I was there, I trapped coyotes to get enough money to buy flour."
Pat and Greta started with a dozen cows but by the time they sold out in 1973, they had a 250-cow outfit. I asked him how they pulled it off when he and Greta started with so little.
"We stayed home," Pat said. "We never went any place, didn't spend any money. The only time we went to town was for groceries and that wasn't often. The people that went broke around here were the ones that when they either had some money would go to town and spend it on things they didn't need. When they got home they were just as broke as when they started."
"Work was what we did for a good time. We had a couple of milk cows, some chickens. There were deer for meat. Eventually we had a generator so that Greta could listen to the radio. We made do mostly with what we had."
"We made our money go as far as it could and we had some damn good friends and they'd help carry me when times were tight.
"Old E.L. Knox gave me a boost. He had a grocery and general goods store in John Day and he'd carry us until we sold some cattle. I didn't pay my bill but once a year."
"And you gotta remember this:," Pat added, "when the whole world in the '30s was drying up and blowing away, there was still grass and water in Izee. It's good stock country."
Smith's brand was the number '9' with a quarter-circle under it.
"Some cowboys would call that the Rockin' Nine," Pat said, "but not me. That's the Quarter-circle-Nine: ain't no rockin' in a chair goin' on around here."
Pat made hay meadows on the irrigated ground on Poison and Rosebud. Next to the irrigated ground he grew rye hay on the dryland ground with good soil. He fenced off the bottoms so that he could keep the cattle off of them in the spring when he was growing hay. He surveyed and made ditches to get the water out of the creeks. He put up rye hay on the benches and grew meadow hay on the bottoms. He ran sheep and pigs in addition to cattle, phasing them out as the cow herd grew. He and Greta would bring in deer hunters in the fall, five or six at a time and make some extra money from them. When there was nothing else going on, he would go to John Day and sell Chevrolets for his brother, Buck Smith, who owned the S & M car dealership. But mostly he stayed home, kept his head down and worked. "My Dad," Rosalie said, "was always right out there with the ranch hands. He didn't let anybody else do the work."
By staying home and working hard Smith's were able to gradually add to their place. They bought the original John Hyde homestead when John's son and grandson, Perry and Emil Hyde, moved over to the Antelope Creek and Lewis Creek country. They bought the Brisbois place on Dry Soda and Henry Trowbridge's place that gave them some ground on Rosebud. Eventually, they had all the deeded land on Dry Soda and Poison Creeks, some land up Rosebud, a mile of meadow ground on the South Fork as well as some rangeland south of the South Fork.
Even after they got land on the South Fork next to the main road through Izee, Smiths continued having their headquarters a couple of miles up Poison Creek. When I asked why Pat replied, "You don't want to live next to a main road, people screw with your stuff."
Pat enjoyed fishing on Poison and Rosebud creeks. The curvy, willow-lined little creeks were full of native trout. But the willows that helped create good fish habitat were in his way for putting up hay on the little shoestring meadows that were beside the creeks.
"One of the first things I did was clean out the willows," Pat said. "They grew so goddamned thick that you couldn't have anything in there but willows. Got a little old tractor and worked that on the willows one winter. After I got land on the South Fork I bought an old Cat and during the winter me or a hired hand would be on it grubbing out the willows and piling and burning them."
In fact, when Pat acquired land on the South Fork itself, people thought he was foolish. The bottom land was so full of willows that it was only good for grazing. But by dozing and burning he was able to make large, productive meadows for growing hay. The irony is that he was too good at getting rid of the willows and eliminated all of them. That led to stream banks that eroded easily and a river that would often change its course during spring floods. The current owners of the ranch, Phil and Kristy St. Clair, have fenced off the riparian areas close to the river and have planted thousands of willows and other hardwoods in order to re-establish shrubs along the stream bank.
Pat calved in February and March. His favorite part of ranching was working with the cows and calves.
"I lived on a horse," Pat said. He wouldn't turn out his cattle until the first of May. That is later than most of the ranches in Izee turned out and when asked why Pat said, "By God, if you didn't take care of the grass, you didn't have any. Some of them would turn out as soon as the snow went off but they never put up enough hay to bring their cattle through in good shape."
"We put up 400 to 500 tons of hay each year and fed cattle every day all winter," Pat said. My rule was that cows with calves had to have 25 pounds of hay per day. Never wanted to have a cow bawl because she was hungry.
"I always put up hay but sometimes it was just rye but you could put up the finest rye hay you ever seen. They could winter on rye hay if you give it to them. Only thing you wanted to do was feed till their bellies bulged on them. Didn't want them to waste hay but you always wanted to see just a little on the feedground the next day.
"I think I was born with a pitchfork in my hands. I spent my whole life either puttin' the damn stuff up or feedin' it out."
In the spring the pairs would run on the deeded ground in the hills between Dry Soda, Poison and Rosebud creeks. The first of June, Pat took 150 pairs to the forest and ran there with Harrisons, Borgs and Hydes. In addition, he ran about 100 head of younger animals 'inside' - on deeded ground.
"I really had to juggle them around and the ranch was pretty well used by them. The cattle on the forest would come off in the fall and graze the meadows as well as some of the deeded ground that had grown back well from the spring grazing.
Pat and Greta didn't have any children until he was 49 and she was 47, when they adopted two little girls, Rosalie and Linda. The girls' folks worked for Smiths the summer of 1950 and had six other kids.
"Our birth parents," Rosalie said, "couldn't afford kids, didn't want kids, but kept having more of them."
The summer their parents worked at the Smiths', 3-year-old Rosalie would help Linda, 1-1/2, walk the quarter mile from the house they were living in to Pat and Greta's house. When asked why they went there Rosalie simply replied, "She would feed us."
By the time the hay was up and summer was over Greta had fallen in love with the little girls. As Greta once told Rosalie, "You were always here anyway, so we decided to adopt you."
When it came time for their parents to look for another job a conversation took place, some documents were signed and the little girls stayed with Greta and Pat who became Mom and Dad.
To think that made everything perfect on the Quarter-circle-9 wouldn't be right. Pat wanted boys. He wanted big strong boys to build fence, buck bales, brand calves and the hundred other things that took strength and endurance. What he got were two little girls: Linda, who suffered from asthma and allergies and could hardly leave the house and Rosalie, who try as she might, was never big enough or strong enough to do the work Pat wanted her to do.
"Mom was never very healthy," Rosalie said, "and so I spent more and more time in the house taking care of her and Linda. As Mom got older she had heart problems and it just seemed like she had cold after cold after cold. When I was 10 years old I cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner by myself. Mom sat on a stool in the kitchen and told me what to do every step of the way."
As time went on and the cow herd grew, Pat and Greta were able to get indoor plumbing and electricity to the house. The draft horses were gradually replaced by tractors and they even had a pickup and a car. They painted the house and barn and shop white. They built board fences around the barnyard and painted them white as well. "It all looked nestled and snug there in the Poison Creek draw," Rosalie said. "My Dad always used white paint because he said 'white was clean.'"
Pat's temper was legendary in the Izee community. One time, Pat and his ranch hand, Mann Lemons, were working on a little 3-foot-wide combine, trying to harvest some rye for seed. Pat was using a crescent wrench to adjust an idler when the wrench slipped off of the nut. Pat mashed his knuckle, fell forward and bumped his head on a gear tooth. Pat stood up, bleeding from head and hand and swearing. The more he swore the madder he gots and he hauled off and threw the crescent wrench as far and hard as he could. What he didn't realize was that his index finger was stuck through the hanger hole on the handle end of the wrench. When he let go the wrench almost tore off his finger.
Mann had to walk away; not only to keep Pat from seeing him laugh, but also out of fear that Pat might tear into him next.
Another time, Rosalie remembers Pat getting home late and still having the two cows to milk. Greta offered to go down to the barn with him and help.
"The milk stool Mom used was tippy," Rosalie said, "and she fell backwards while milking the cow." As Greta fell, she pulled too hard on the cows teat which caused the cow to kick over the pail of milk. The milk ran down to Pat's cow which started stomping in the milk and getting Pat covered with a mixture of milk, manure and urine.
"Goddam, Greta, what the hell have you done?" Pat said. But he got up and went to help Greta up - but then he made a mistake when he added, "Damn it, Greta! Can't you even milk a cow?"
That was the last straw for Greta, who also was at the end of a long day. She picked up the tippy stool, threw it at Pat and said, "I'll never be in this barn again." And she wasn't.
Mann Lemons' version of the story has it that Pat then picked up Greta and threw her out a window of the barn into a manure pile. But Rosalie doesn't buy it.
"My Dad," Rosalie said, "was a mean-tempered man, but I never saw him lift a hand to my Mom. Whatever my Mom said, Dad did. He may have gotten mad at her, but he respected her."
Pat Smith said he felt like an outsider in Izee the whole 40 years he was there.
"I wasn't born there and I had to elbow my way in and buy land that others had hoped they'd get for nothing," he said.
Insecure about his own survival and of ever becoming prosperous, Pat didn't want to be beholden to any of his neighbors. He only helped at brandings of the neighbors who he expected to come to his. Of course, everyone else in Izee loved to brand calves and whenever Pat had a branding the whole community would show up.
To be more independent, Pat bought a calf table, a device that holds the calf on its side so that one man can catch the calf, brand, vaccinate, castrate, dehorn and earmark it. All Pat needed was his ranch hand to bring the calves up a chute to the table and maybe a teenage kid to help hold the head.
A tape recording of a visit that Pat had with Jack St. Clair in 1981 revealed that despite feeling like an outsider he did things for the community as well.
"I knew this one thing: a new man going into the community better get along with the people," he said.
That sentiment carried over to the school. The Izee schoolhouse was located on Pat's land. The first schoolhouse had been built there when John Hyde still owned the land. "I never deeded the school one thing," Pat told Jack St. Clair. "I was interested in the schoolhouse in only that there was a decent school there. Whose land the school was on I didn't give a damn."
The people in Izee that Pat liked were the survivors. He got along with Columbus Phillips, his neighbor to the west on Morgan Creek, who, like Pat, was having to claw and scrape for everything he got and he was every bit as gruff as Pat. Pat liked Perry Hyde, his neighbor to the west on Rosebud and Antelope Creeks, who was even more profane than Pat but as Pat said, "Old Perry was as good a neighbor as I had. If you got in a jam he was there to help you out."
Even though Pat didn't like Hamp Officer - "took all of his own grass and a little more, overbearing," he liked Joe and his boys, Wade and Gene - "large family, good people."
"Dad was a hard person to get close to. He was a harsh, stern man but inside, he had a heart of gold," Rosalie said.
Pat's independence stayed with him right up to his last year of ranching in 1973. He'd made a deal to sell the calves and the buyer was at the corral to take delivery. "They wanted a few dinks cut off and so I did but then they wanted a few more cut off for this, and then a few more for that. I said to 'em, 'Screw you - you take 'em the way I bring 'em or you don't take 'em at all. And that was the end of the cutting."
Greta died the next year in 1974. Pat remarried in 1976 to Louise Alford who died in 1998. Pat died in Condon in June of 2002, a bit over 100 years old.
Beating the odds in Izee
A tale of tough times and a tough ranch family who survived them
By Jack Southworth
For the Blue Mountain Eagle 10/1/2009
IZEE - Things aren't all that bright for Grant County's economy right now with mills shutting down and an unemployment rate that's among the highest in the state. But if you think things are tough now, you haven't heard about the late Pat Smith, and how he and his wife, Greta, started off with almost nothing in the 1930s and ended up with a 250-cow outfit out in Izee.
Edgar Poe "Pat" Smith was born at Fossil in 1901 and raised on a wheat ranch near Mayville. After graduating from Wheeler County High School in Fossil, Pat worked on the family ranch for several years. He had seven brothers and three sisters.
"There were too many boys for too small a place so I had to find a way to make a living elsewhere," he said.
Pat married Greta McRae in 1925. Two years younger than Pat, she had grown up near Fossil and they had been in high school together. After high school, Greta had taught school at Badger (north of Mayville) for a few years. They were an odd couple to look at: Pat was almost 6-foot and solidly built. Greta was only 5-feet-tall and thin. He was gruff, taciturn and short-tempered; she was talkative and friendly. What they shared was a passion for hard work and a willingness in the early years on the ranch to sacrifice pleasures in the present for a better future.
Pat and Greta owned and operated a store in Condon for a while and then went to California, where Pat worked in the oil fields. The Depression cost him that job so in 1933 they moved to Izee and took over a small place that Pat's sister, Pearl, and her husband, Rollo Johnson, had operated. The ranch was up Poison Creek above John Hyde's original homestead, and Rollo and Pearl had gone broke on the place and abandoned it. When Pat and Greta moved there in 1933 they had a team of draft horses, a milk cow, a few head of beef cows and a couple of saddle horses.
In 2000, when Pat was 99, I visited him at a nursing home in Condon. I asked if he and Greta had bought the place from Pearl and Rollo. Still sharp of mind, he leaned toward me and says, "You don't get it do you? They went broke. They walked away from the place with nothing. We moved in with nothing and we were there three years before we could pay the back taxes and get the deed to the place. The first two winters I was there, I trapped coyotes to get enough money to buy flour."
Pat and Greta started with a dozen cows but by the time they sold out in 1973, they had a 250-cow outfit. I asked him how they pulled it off when he and Greta started with so little.
"We stayed home," Pat said. "We never went any place, didn't spend any money. The only time we went to town was for groceries and that wasn't often. The people that went broke around here were the ones that when they either had some money would go to town and spend it on things they didn't need. When they got home they were just as broke as when they started."
"Work was what we did for a good time. We had a couple of milk cows, some chickens. There were deer for meat. Eventually we had a generator so that Greta could listen to the radio. We made do mostly with what we had."
"We made our money go as far as it could and we had some damn good friends and they'd help carry me when times were tight.
"Old E.L. Knox gave me a boost. He had a grocery and general goods store in John Day and he'd carry us until we sold some cattle. I didn't pay my bill but once a year."
"And you gotta remember this:," Pat added, "when the whole world in the '30s was drying up and blowing away, there was still grass and water in Izee. It's good stock country."
Smith's brand was the number '9' with a quarter-circle under it.
"Some cowboys would call that the Rockin' Nine," Pat said, "but not me. That's the Quarter-circle-Nine: ain't no rockin' in a chair goin' on around here."
Pat made hay meadows on the irrigated ground on Poison and Rosebud. Next to the irrigated ground he grew rye hay on the dryland ground with good soil. He fenced off the bottoms so that he could keep the cattle off of them in the spring when he was growing hay. He surveyed and made ditches to get the water out of the creeks. He put up rye hay on the benches and grew meadow hay on the bottoms. He ran sheep and pigs in addition to cattle, phasing them out as the cow herd grew. He and Greta would bring in deer hunters in the fall, five or six at a time and make some extra money from them. When there was nothing else going on, he would go to John Day and sell Chevrolets for his brother, Buck Smith, who owned the S & M car dealership. But mostly he stayed home, kept his head down and worked. "My Dad," Rosalie said, "was always right out there with the ranch hands. He didn't let anybody else do the work."
By staying home and working hard Smith's were able to gradually add to their place. They bought the original John Hyde homestead when John's son and grandson, Perry and Emil Hyde, moved over to the Antelope Creek and Lewis Creek country. They bought the Brisbois place on Dry Soda and Henry Trowbridge's place that gave them some ground on Rosebud. Eventually, they had all the deeded land on Dry Soda and Poison Creeks, some land up Rosebud, a mile of meadow ground on the South Fork as well as some rangeland south of the South Fork.
Even after they got land on the South Fork next to the main road through Izee, Smiths continued having their headquarters a couple of miles up Poison Creek. When I asked why Pat replied, "You don't want to live next to a main road, people screw with your stuff."
Pat enjoyed fishing on Poison and Rosebud creeks. The curvy, willow-lined little creeks were full of native trout. But the willows that helped create good fish habitat were in his way for putting up hay on the little shoestring meadows that were beside the creeks.
"One of the first things I did was clean out the willows," Pat said. "They grew so goddamned thick that you couldn't have anything in there but willows. Got a little old tractor and worked that on the willows one winter. After I got land on the South Fork I bought an old Cat and during the winter me or a hired hand would be on it grubbing out the willows and piling and burning them."
In fact, when Pat acquired land on the South Fork itself, people thought he was foolish. The bottom land was so full of willows that it was only good for grazing. But by dozing and burning he was able to make large, productive meadows for growing hay. The irony is that he was too good at getting rid of the willows and eliminated all of them. That led to stream banks that eroded easily and a river that would often change its course during spring floods. The current owners of the ranch, Phil and Kristy St. Clair, have fenced off the riparian areas close to the river and have planted thousands of willows and other hardwoods in order to re-establish shrubs along the stream bank.
Pat calved in February and March. His favorite part of ranching was working with the cows and calves.
"I lived on a horse," Pat said. He wouldn't turn out his cattle until the first of May. That is later than most of the ranches in Izee turned out and when asked why Pat said, "By God, if you didn't take care of the grass, you didn't have any. Some of them would turn out as soon as the snow went off but they never put up enough hay to bring their cattle through in good shape."
"We put up 400 to 500 tons of hay each year and fed cattle every day all winter," Pat said. My rule was that cows with calves had to have 25 pounds of hay per day. Never wanted to have a cow bawl because she was hungry.
"I always put up hay but sometimes it was just rye but you could put up the finest rye hay you ever seen. They could winter on rye hay if you give it to them. Only thing you wanted to do was feed till their bellies bulged on them. Didn't want them to waste hay but you always wanted to see just a little on the feedground the next day.
"I think I was born with a pitchfork in my hands. I spent my whole life either puttin' the damn stuff up or feedin' it out."
In the spring the pairs would run on the deeded ground in the hills between Dry Soda, Poison and Rosebud creeks. The first of June, Pat took 150 pairs to the forest and ran there with Harrisons, Borgs and Hydes. In addition, he ran about 100 head of younger animals 'inside' - on deeded ground.
"I really had to juggle them around and the ranch was pretty well used by them. The cattle on the forest would come off in the fall and graze the meadows as well as some of the deeded ground that had grown back well from the spring grazing.
Pat and Greta didn't have any children until he was 49 and she was 47, when they adopted two little girls, Rosalie and Linda. The girls' folks worked for Smiths the summer of 1950 and had six other kids.
"Our birth parents," Rosalie said, "couldn't afford kids, didn't want kids, but kept having more of them."
The summer their parents worked at the Smiths', 3-year-old Rosalie would help Linda, 1-1/2, walk the quarter mile from the house they were living in to Pat and Greta's house. When asked why they went there Rosalie simply replied, "She would feed us."
By the time the hay was up and summer was over Greta had fallen in love with the little girls. As Greta once told Rosalie, "You were always here anyway, so we decided to adopt you."
When it came time for their parents to look for another job a conversation took place, some documents were signed and the little girls stayed with Greta and Pat who became Mom and Dad.
To think that made everything perfect on the Quarter-circle-9 wouldn't be right. Pat wanted boys. He wanted big strong boys to build fence, buck bales, brand calves and the hundred other things that took strength and endurance. What he got were two little girls: Linda, who suffered from asthma and allergies and could hardly leave the house and Rosalie, who try as she might, was never big enough or strong enough to do the work Pat wanted her to do.
"Mom was never very healthy," Rosalie said, "and so I spent more and more time in the house taking care of her and Linda. As Mom got older she had heart problems and it just seemed like she had cold after cold after cold. When I was 10 years old I cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner by myself. Mom sat on a stool in the kitchen and told me what to do every step of the way."
As time went on and the cow herd grew, Pat and Greta were able to get indoor plumbing and electricity to the house. The draft horses were gradually replaced by tractors and they even had a pickup and a car. They painted the house and barn and shop white. They built board fences around the barnyard and painted them white as well. "It all looked nestled and snug there in the Poison Creek draw," Rosalie said. "My Dad always used white paint because he said 'white was clean.'"
Pat's temper was legendary in the Izee community. One time, Pat and his ranch hand, Mann Lemons, were working on a little 3-foot-wide combine, trying to harvest some rye for seed. Pat was using a crescent wrench to adjust an idler when the wrench slipped off of the nut. Pat mashed his knuckle, fell forward and bumped his head on a gear tooth. Pat stood up, bleeding from head and hand and swearing. The more he swore the madder he gots and he hauled off and threw the crescent wrench as far and hard as he could. What he didn't realize was that his index finger was stuck through the hanger hole on the handle end of the wrench. When he let go the wrench almost tore off his finger.
Mann had to walk away; not only to keep Pat from seeing him laugh, but also out of fear that Pat might tear into him next.
Another time, Rosalie remembers Pat getting home late and still having the two cows to milk. Greta offered to go down to the barn with him and help.
"The milk stool Mom used was tippy," Rosalie said, "and she fell backwards while milking the cow." As Greta fell, she pulled too hard on the cows teat which caused the cow to kick over the pail of milk. The milk ran down to Pat's cow which started stomping in the milk and getting Pat covered with a mixture of milk, manure and urine.
"Goddam, Greta, what the hell have you done?" Pat said. But he got up and went to help Greta up - but then he made a mistake when he added, "Damn it, Greta! Can't you even milk a cow?"
That was the last straw for Greta, who also was at the end of a long day. She picked up the tippy stool, threw it at Pat and said, "I'll never be in this barn again." And she wasn't.
Mann Lemons' version of the story has it that Pat then picked up Greta and threw her out a window of the barn into a manure pile. But Rosalie doesn't buy it.
"My Dad," Rosalie said, "was a mean-tempered man, but I never saw him lift a hand to my Mom. Whatever my Mom said, Dad did. He may have gotten mad at her, but he respected her."
Pat Smith said he felt like an outsider in Izee the whole 40 years he was there.
"I wasn't born there and I had to elbow my way in and buy land that others had hoped they'd get for nothing," he said.
Insecure about his own survival and of ever becoming prosperous, Pat didn't want to be beholden to any of his neighbors. He only helped at brandings of the neighbors who he expected to come to his. Of course, everyone else in Izee loved to brand calves and whenever Pat had a branding the whole community would show up.
To be more independent, Pat bought a calf table, a device that holds the calf on its side so that one man can catch the calf, brand, vaccinate, castrate, dehorn and earmark it. All Pat needed was his ranch hand to bring the calves up a chute to the table and maybe a teenage kid to help hold the head.
A tape recording of a visit that Pat had with Jack St. Clair in 1981 revealed that despite feeling like an outsider he did things for the community as well.
"I knew this one thing: a new man going into the community better get along with the people," he said.
That sentiment carried over to the school. The Izee schoolhouse was located on Pat's land. The first schoolhouse had been built there when John Hyde still owned the land. "I never deeded the school one thing," Pat told Jack St. Clair. "I was interested in the schoolhouse in only that there was a decent school there. Whose land the school was on I didn't give a damn."
The people in Izee that Pat liked were the survivors. He got along with Columbus Phillips, his neighbor to the west on Morgan Creek, who, like Pat, was having to claw and scrape for everything he got and he was every bit as gruff as Pat. Pat liked Perry Hyde, his neighbor to the west on Rosebud and Antelope Creeks, who was even more profane than Pat but as Pat said, "Old Perry was as good a neighbor as I had. If you got in a jam he was there to help you out."
Even though Pat didn't like Hamp Officer - "took all of his own grass and a little more, overbearing," he liked Joe and his boys, Wade and Gene - "large family, good people."
"Dad was a hard person to get close to. He was a harsh, stern man but inside, he had a heart of gold," Rosalie said.
Pat's independence stayed with him right up to his last year of ranching in 1973. He'd made a deal to sell the calves and the buyer was at the corral to take delivery. "They wanted a few dinks cut off and so I did but then they wanted a few more cut off for this, and then a few more for that. I said to 'em, 'Screw you - you take 'em the way I bring 'em or you don't take 'em at all. And that was the end of the cutting."
Greta died the next year in 1974. Pat remarried in 1976 to Louise Alford who died in 1998. Pat died in Condon in June of 2002, a bit over 100 years old.
Parents: F.E. And Mary E. Smith
Beating the odds in Izee
A tale of tough times and a tough ranch family who survived them
By Jack Southworth
For the Blue Mountain Eagle 10/1/2009
IZEE - Things aren't all that bright for Grant County's economy right now with mills shutting down and an unemployment rate that's among the highest in the state. But if you think things are tough now, you haven't heard about the late Pat Smith, and how he and his wife, Greta, started off with almost nothing in the 1930s and ended up with a 250-cow outfit out in Izee.
Edgar Poe "Pat" Smith was born at Fossil in 1901 and raised on a wheat ranch near Mayville. After graduating from Wheeler County High School in Fossil, Pat worked on the family ranch for several years. He had seven brothers and three sisters.
"There were too many boys for too small a place so I had to find a way to make a living elsewhere," he said.
Pat married Greta McRae in 1925. Two years younger than Pat, she had grown up near Fossil and they had been in high school together. After high school, Greta had taught school at Badger (north of Mayville) for a few years. They were an odd couple to look at: Pat was almost 6-foot and solidly built. Greta was only 5-feet-tall and thin. He was gruff, taciturn and short-tempered; she was talkative and friendly. What they shared was a passion for hard work and a willingness in the early years on the ranch to sacrifice pleasures in the present for a better future.
Pat and Greta owned and operated a store in Condon for a while and then went to California, where Pat worked in the oil fields. The Depression cost him that job so in 1933 they moved to Izee and took over a small place that Pat's sister, Pearl, and her husband, Rollo Johnson, had operated. The ranch was up Poison Creek above John Hyde's original homestead, and Rollo and Pearl had gone broke on the place and abandoned it. When Pat and Greta moved there in 1933 they had a team of draft horses, a milk cow, a few head of beef cows and a couple of saddle horses.
In 2000, when Pat was 99, I visited him at a nursing home in Condon. I asked if he and Greta had bought the place from Pearl and Rollo. Still sharp of mind, he leaned toward me and says, "You don't get it do you? They went broke. They walked away from the place with nothing. We moved in with nothing and we were there three years before we could pay the back taxes and get the deed to the place. The first two winters I was there, I trapped coyotes to get enough money to buy flour."
Pat and Greta started with a dozen cows but by the time they sold out in 1973, they had a 250-cow outfit. I asked him how they pulled it off when he and Greta started with so little.
"We stayed home," Pat said. "We never went any place, didn't spend any money. The only time we went to town was for groceries and that wasn't often. The people that went broke around here were the ones that when they either had some money would go to town and spend it on things they didn't need. When they got home they were just as broke as when they started."
"Work was what we did for a good time. We had a couple of milk cows, some chickens. There were deer for meat. Eventually we had a generator so that Greta could listen to the radio. We made do mostly with what we had."
"We made our money go as far as it could and we had some damn good friends and they'd help carry me when times were tight.
"Old E.L. Knox gave me a boost. He had a grocery and general goods store in John Day and he'd carry us until we sold some cattle. I didn't pay my bill but once a year."
"And you gotta remember this:," Pat added, "when the whole world in the '30s was drying up and blowing away, there was still grass and water in Izee. It's good stock country."
Smith's brand was the number '9' with a quarter-circle under it.
"Some cowboys would call that the Rockin' Nine," Pat said, "but not me. That's the Quarter-circle-Nine: ain't no rockin' in a chair goin' on around here."
Pat made hay meadows on the irrigated ground on Poison and Rosebud. Next to the irrigated ground he grew rye hay on the dryland ground with good soil. He fenced off the bottoms so that he could keep the cattle off of them in the spring when he was growing hay. He surveyed and made ditches to get the water out of the creeks. He put up rye hay on the benches and grew meadow hay on the bottoms. He ran sheep and pigs in addition to cattle, phasing them out as the cow herd grew. He and Greta would bring in deer hunters in the fall, five or six at a time and make some extra money from them. When there was nothing else going on, he would go to John Day and sell Chevrolets for his brother, Buck Smith, who owned the S & M car dealership. But mostly he stayed home, kept his head down and worked. "My Dad," Rosalie said, "was always right out there with the ranch hands. He didn't let anybody else do the work."
By staying home and working hard Smith's were able to gradually add to their place. They bought the original John Hyde homestead when John's son and grandson, Perry and Emil Hyde, moved over to the Antelope Creek and Lewis Creek country. They bought the Brisbois place on Dry Soda and Henry Trowbridge's place that gave them some ground on Rosebud. Eventually, they had all the deeded land on Dry Soda and Poison Creeks, some land up Rosebud, a mile of meadow ground on the South Fork as well as some rangeland south of the South Fork.
Even after they got land on the South Fork next to the main road through Izee, Smiths continued having their headquarters a couple of miles up Poison Creek. When I asked why Pat replied, "You don't want to live next to a main road, people screw with your stuff."
Pat enjoyed fishing on Poison and Rosebud creeks. The curvy, willow-lined little creeks were full of native trout. But the willows that helped create good fish habitat were in his way for putting up hay on the little shoestring meadows that were beside the creeks.
"One of the first things I did was clean out the willows," Pat said. "They grew so goddamned thick that you couldn't have anything in there but willows. Got a little old tractor and worked that on the willows one winter. After I got land on the South Fork I bought an old Cat and during the winter me or a hired hand would be on it grubbing out the willows and piling and burning them."
In fact, when Pat acquired land on the South Fork itself, people thought he was foolish. The bottom land was so full of willows that it was only good for grazing. But by dozing and burning he was able to make large, productive meadows for growing hay. The irony is that he was too good at getting rid of the willows and eliminated all of them. That led to stream banks that eroded easily and a river that would often change its course during spring floods. The current owners of the ranch, Phil and Kristy St. Clair, have fenced off the riparian areas close to the river and have planted thousands of willows and other hardwoods in order to re-establish shrubs along the stream bank.
Pat calved in February and March. His favorite part of ranching was working with the cows and calves.
"I lived on a horse," Pat said. He wouldn't turn out his cattle until the first of May. That is later than most of the ranches in Izee turned out and when asked why Pat said, "By God, if you didn't take care of the grass, you didn't have any. Some of them would turn out as soon as the snow went off but they never put up enough hay to bring their cattle through in good shape."
"We put up 400 to 500 tons of hay each year and fed cattle every day all winter," Pat said. My rule was that cows with calves had to have 25 pounds of hay per day. Never wanted to have a cow bawl because she was hungry.
"I always put up hay but sometimes it was just rye but you could put up the finest rye hay you ever seen. They could winter on rye hay if you give it to them. Only thing you wanted to do was feed till their bellies bulged on them. Didn't want them to waste hay but you always wanted to see just a little on the feedground the next day.
"I think I was born with a pitchfork in my hands. I spent my whole life either puttin' the damn stuff up or feedin' it out."
In the spring the pairs would run on the deeded ground in the hills between Dry Soda, Poison and Rosebud creeks. The first of June, Pat took 150 pairs to the forest and ran there with Harrisons, Borgs and Hydes. In addition, he ran about 100 head of younger animals 'inside' - on deeded ground.
"I really had to juggle them around and the ranch was pretty well used by them. The cattle on the forest would come off in the fall and graze the meadows as well as some of the deeded ground that had grown back well from the spring grazing.
Pat and Greta didn't have any children until he was 49 and she was 47, when they adopted two little girls, Rosalie and Linda. The girls' folks worked for Smiths the summer of 1950 and had six other kids.
"Our birth parents," Rosalie said, "couldn't afford kids, didn't want kids, but kept having more of them."
The summer their parents worked at the Smiths', 3-year-old Rosalie would help Linda, 1-1/2, walk the quarter mile from the house they were living in to Pat and Greta's house. When asked why they went there Rosalie simply replied, "She would feed us."
By the time the hay was up and summer was over Greta had fallen in love with the little girls. As Greta once told Rosalie, "You were always here anyway, so we decided to adopt you."
When it came time for their parents to look for another job a conversation took place, some documents were signed and the little girls stayed with Greta and Pat who became Mom and Dad.
To think that made everything perfect on the Quarter-circle-9 wouldn't be right. Pat wanted boys. He wanted big strong boys to build fence, buck bales, brand calves and the hundred other things that took strength and endurance. What he got were two little girls: Linda, who suffered from asthma and allergies and could hardly leave the house and Rosalie, who try as she might, was never big enough or strong enough to do the work Pat wanted her to do.
"Mom was never very healthy," Rosalie said, "and so I spent more and more time in the house taking care of her and Linda. As Mom got older she had heart problems and it just seemed like she had cold after cold after cold. When I was 10 years old I cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner by myself. Mom sat on a stool in the kitchen and told me what to do every step of the way."
As time went on and the cow herd grew, Pat and Greta were able to get indoor plumbing and electricity to the house. The draft horses were gradually replaced by tractors and they even had a pickup and a car. They painted the house and barn and shop white. They built board fences around the barnyard and painted them white as well. "It all looked nestled and snug there in the Poison Creek draw," Rosalie said. "My Dad always used white paint because he said 'white was clean.'"
Pat's temper was legendary in the Izee community. One time, Pat and his ranch hand, Mann Lemons, were working on a little 3-foot-wide combine, trying to harvest some rye for seed. Pat was using a crescent wrench to adjust an idler when the wrench slipped off of the nut. Pat mashed his knuckle, fell forward and bumped his head on a gear tooth. Pat stood up, bleeding from head and hand and swearing. The more he swore the madder he gots and he hauled off and threw the crescent wrench as far and hard as he could. What he didn't realize was that his index finger was stuck through the hanger hole on the handle end of the wrench. When he let go the wrench almost tore off his finger.
Mann had to walk away; not only to keep Pat from seeing him laugh, but also out of fear that Pat might tear into him next.
Another time, Rosalie remembers Pat getting home late and still having the two cows to milk. Greta offered to go down to the barn with him and help.
"The milk stool Mom used was tippy," Rosalie said, "and she fell backwards while milking the cow." As Greta fell, she pulled too hard on the cows teat which caused the cow to kick over the pail of milk. The milk ran down to Pat's cow which started stomping in the milk and getting Pat covered with a mixture of milk, manure and urine.
"Goddam, Greta, what the hell have you done?" Pat said. But he got up and went to help Greta up - but then he made a mistake when he added, "Damn it, Greta! Can't you even milk a cow?"
That was the last straw for Greta, who also was at the end of a long day. She picked up the tippy stool, threw it at Pat and said, "I'll never be in this barn again." And she wasn't.
Mann Lemons' version of the story has it that Pat then picked up Greta and threw her out a window of the barn into a manure pile. But Rosalie doesn't buy it.
"My Dad," Rosalie said, "was a mean-tempered man, but I never saw him lift a hand to my Mom. Whatever my Mom said, Dad did. He may have gotten mad at her, but he respected her."
Pat Smith said he felt like an outsider in Izee the whole 40 years he was there.
"I wasn't born there and I had to elbow my way in and buy land that others had hoped they'd get for nothing," he said.
Insecure about his own survival and of ever becoming prosperous, Pat didn't want to be beholden to any of his neighbors. He only helped at brandings of the neighbors who he expected to come to his. Of course, everyone else in Izee loved to brand calves and whenever Pat had a branding the whole community would show up.
To be more independent, Pat bought a calf table, a device that holds the calf on its side so that one man can catch the calf, brand, vaccinate, castrate, dehorn and earmark it. All Pat needed was his ranch hand to bring the calves up a chute to the table and maybe a teenage kid to help hold the head.
A tape recording of a visit that Pat had with Jack St. Clair in 1981 revealed that despite feeling like an outsider he did things for the community as well.
"I knew this one thing: a new man going into the community better get along with the people," he said.
That sentiment carried over to the school. The Izee schoolhouse was located on Pat's land. The first schoolhouse had been built there when John Hyde still owned the land. "I never deeded the school one thing," Pat told Jack St. Clair. "I was interested in the schoolhouse in only that there was a decent school there. Whose land the school was on I didn't give a damn."
The people in Izee that Pat liked were the survivors. He got along with Columbus Phillips, his neighbor to the west on Morgan Creek, who, like Pat, was having to claw and scrape for everything he got and he was every bit as gruff as Pat. Pat liked Perry Hyde, his neighbor to the west on Rosebud and Antelope Creeks, who was even more profane than Pat but as Pat said, "Old Perry was as good a neighbor as I had. If you got in a jam he was there to help you out."
Even though Pat didn't like Hamp Officer - "took all of his own grass and a little more, overbearing," he liked Joe and his boys, Wade and Gene - "large family, good people."
"Dad was a hard person to get close to. He was a harsh, stern man but inside, he had a heart of gold," Rosalie said.
Pat's independence stayed with him right up to his last year of ranching in 1973. He'd made a deal to sell the calves and the buyer was at the corral to take delivery. "They wanted a few dinks cut off and so I did but then they wanted a few more cut off for this, and then a few more for that. I said to 'em, 'Screw you - you take 'em the way I bring 'em or you don't take 'em at all. And that was the end of the cutting."
Greta died the next year in 1974. Pat remarried in 1976 to Louise Alford who died in 1998. Pat died in Condon in June of 2002, a bit over 100 years old.
Beating the odds in Izee
A tale of tough times and a tough ranch family who survived them
By Jack Southworth
For the Blue Mountain Eagle 10/1/2009
IZEE - Things aren't all that bright for Grant County's economy right now with mills shutting down and an unemployment rate that's among the highest in the state. But if you think things are tough now, you haven't heard about the late Pat Smith, and how he and his wife, Greta, started off with almost nothing in the 1930s and ended up with a 250-cow outfit out in Izee.
Edgar Poe "Pat" Smith was born at Fossil in 1901 and raised on a wheat ranch near Mayville. After graduating from Wheeler County High School in Fossil, Pat worked on the family ranch for several years. He had seven brothers and three sisters.
"There were too many boys for too small a place so I had to find a way to make a living elsewhere," he said.
Pat married Greta McRae in 1925. Two years younger than Pat, she had grown up near Fossil and they had been in high school together. After high school, Greta had taught school at Badger (north of Mayville) for a few years. They were an odd couple to look at: Pat was almost 6-foot and solidly built. Greta was only 5-feet-tall and thin. He was gruff, taciturn and short-tempered; she was talkative and friendly. What they shared was a passion for hard work and a willingness in the early years on the ranch to sacrifice pleasures in the present for a better future.
Pat and Greta owned and operated a store in Condon for a while and then went to California, where Pat worked in the oil fields. The Depression cost him that job so in 1933 they moved to Izee and took over a small place that Pat's sister, Pearl, and her husband, Rollo Johnson, had operated. The ranch was up Poison Creek above John Hyde's original homestead, and Rollo and Pearl had gone broke on the place and abandoned it. When Pat and Greta moved there in 1933 they had a team of draft horses, a milk cow, a few head of beef cows and a couple of saddle horses.
In 2000, when Pat was 99, I visited him at a nursing home in Condon. I asked if he and Greta had bought the place from Pearl and Rollo. Still sharp of mind, he leaned toward me and says, "You don't get it do you? They went broke. They walked away from the place with nothing. We moved in with nothing and we were there three years before we could pay the back taxes and get the deed to the place. The first two winters I was there, I trapped coyotes to get enough money to buy flour."
Pat and Greta started with a dozen cows but by the time they sold out in 1973, they had a 250-cow outfit. I asked him how they pulled it off when he and Greta started with so little.
"We stayed home," Pat said. "We never went any place, didn't spend any money. The only time we went to town was for groceries and that wasn't often. The people that went broke around here were the ones that when they either had some money would go to town and spend it on things they didn't need. When they got home they were just as broke as when they started."
"Work was what we did for a good time. We had a couple of milk cows, some chickens. There were deer for meat. Eventually we had a generator so that Greta could listen to the radio. We made do mostly with what we had."
"We made our money go as far as it could and we had some damn good friends and they'd help carry me when times were tight.
"Old E.L. Knox gave me a boost. He had a grocery and general goods store in John Day and he'd carry us until we sold some cattle. I didn't pay my bill but once a year."
"And you gotta remember this:," Pat added, "when the whole world in the '30s was drying up and blowing away, there was still grass and water in Izee. It's good stock country."
Smith's brand was the number '9' with a quarter-circle under it.
"Some cowboys would call that the Rockin' Nine," Pat said, "but not me. That's the Quarter-circle-Nine: ain't no rockin' in a chair goin' on around here."
Pat made hay meadows on the irrigated ground on Poison and Rosebud. Next to the irrigated ground he grew rye hay on the dryland ground with good soil. He fenced off the bottoms so that he could keep the cattle off of them in the spring when he was growing hay. He surveyed and made ditches to get the water out of the creeks. He put up rye hay on the benches and grew meadow hay on the bottoms. He ran sheep and pigs in addition to cattle, phasing them out as the cow herd grew. He and Greta would bring in deer hunters in the fall, five or six at a time and make some extra money from them. When there was nothing else going on, he would go to John Day and sell Chevrolets for his brother, Buck Smith, who owned the S & M car dealership. But mostly he stayed home, kept his head down and worked. "My Dad," Rosalie said, "was always right out there with the ranch hands. He didn't let anybody else do the work."
By staying home and working hard Smith's were able to gradually add to their place. They bought the original John Hyde homestead when John's son and grandson, Perry and Emil Hyde, moved over to the Antelope Creek and Lewis Creek country. They bought the Brisbois place on Dry Soda and Henry Trowbridge's place that gave them some ground on Rosebud. Eventually, they had all the deeded land on Dry Soda and Poison Creeks, some land up Rosebud, a mile of meadow ground on the South Fork as well as some rangeland south of the South Fork.
Even after they got land on the South Fork next to the main road through Izee, Smiths continued having their headquarters a couple of miles up Poison Creek. When I asked why Pat replied, "You don't want to live next to a main road, people screw with your stuff."
Pat enjoyed fishing on Poison and Rosebud creeks. The curvy, willow-lined little creeks were full of native trout. But the willows that helped create good fish habitat were in his way for putting up hay on the little shoestring meadows that were beside the creeks.
"One of the first things I did was clean out the willows," Pat said. "They grew so goddamned thick that you couldn't have anything in there but willows. Got a little old tractor and worked that on the willows one winter. After I got land on the South Fork I bought an old Cat and during the winter me or a hired hand would be on it grubbing out the willows and piling and burning them."
In fact, when Pat acquired land on the South Fork itself, people thought he was foolish. The bottom land was so full of willows that it was only good for grazing. But by dozing and burning he was able to make large, productive meadows for growing hay. The irony is that he was too good at getting rid of the willows and eliminated all of them. That led to stream banks that eroded easily and a river that would often change its course during spring floods. The current owners of the ranch, Phil and Kristy St. Clair, have fenced off the riparian areas close to the river and have planted thousands of willows and other hardwoods in order to re-establish shrubs along the stream bank.
Pat calved in February and March. His favorite part of ranching was working with the cows and calves.
"I lived on a horse," Pat said. He wouldn't turn out his cattle until the first of May. That is later than most of the ranches in Izee turned out and when asked why Pat said, "By God, if you didn't take care of the grass, you didn't have any. Some of them would turn out as soon as the snow went off but they never put up enough hay to bring their cattle through in good shape."
"We put up 400 to 500 tons of hay each year and fed cattle every day all winter," Pat said. My rule was that cows with calves had to have 25 pounds of hay per day. Never wanted to have a cow bawl because she was hungry.
"I always put up hay but sometimes it was just rye but you could put up the finest rye hay you ever seen. They could winter on rye hay if you give it to them. Only thing you wanted to do was feed till their bellies bulged on them. Didn't want them to waste hay but you always wanted to see just a little on the feedground the next day.
"I think I was born with a pitchfork in my hands. I spent my whole life either puttin' the damn stuff up or feedin' it out."
In the spring the pairs would run on the deeded ground in the hills between Dry Soda, Poison and Rosebud creeks. The first of June, Pat took 150 pairs to the forest and ran there with Harrisons, Borgs and Hydes. In addition, he ran about 100 head of younger animals 'inside' - on deeded ground.
"I really had to juggle them around and the ranch was pretty well used by them. The cattle on the forest would come off in the fall and graze the meadows as well as some of the deeded ground that had grown back well from the spring grazing.
Pat and Greta didn't have any children until he was 49 and she was 47, when they adopted two little girls, Rosalie and Linda. The girls' folks worked for Smiths the summer of 1950 and had six other kids.
"Our birth parents," Rosalie said, "couldn't afford kids, didn't want kids, but kept having more of them."
The summer their parents worked at the Smiths', 3-year-old Rosalie would help Linda, 1-1/2, walk the quarter mile from the house they were living in to Pat and Greta's house. When asked why they went there Rosalie simply replied, "She would feed us."
By the time the hay was up and summer was over Greta had fallen in love with the little girls. As Greta once told Rosalie, "You were always here anyway, so we decided to adopt you."
When it came time for their parents to look for another job a conversation took place, some documents were signed and the little girls stayed with Greta and Pat who became Mom and Dad.
To think that made everything perfect on the Quarter-circle-9 wouldn't be right. Pat wanted boys. He wanted big strong boys to build fence, buck bales, brand calves and the hundred other things that took strength and endurance. What he got were two little girls: Linda, who suffered from asthma and allergies and could hardly leave the house and Rosalie, who try as she might, was never big enough or strong enough to do the work Pat wanted her to do.
"Mom was never very healthy," Rosalie said, "and so I spent more and more time in the house taking care of her and Linda. As Mom got older she had heart problems and it just seemed like she had cold after cold after cold. When I was 10 years old I cooked the whole Thanksgiving dinner by myself. Mom sat on a stool in the kitchen and told me what to do every step of the way."
As time went on and the cow herd grew, Pat and Greta were able to get indoor plumbing and electricity to the house. The draft horses were gradually replaced by tractors and they even had a pickup and a car. They painted the house and barn and shop white. They built board fences around the barnyard and painted them white as well. "It all looked nestled and snug there in the Poison Creek draw," Rosalie said. "My Dad always used white paint because he said 'white was clean.'"
Pat's temper was legendary in the Izee community. One time, Pat and his ranch hand, Mann Lemons, were working on a little 3-foot-wide combine, trying to harvest some rye for seed. Pat was using a crescent wrench to adjust an idler when the wrench slipped off of the nut. Pat mashed his knuckle, fell forward and bumped his head on a gear tooth. Pat stood up, bleeding from head and hand and swearing. The more he swore the madder he gots and he hauled off and threw the crescent wrench as far and hard as he could. What he didn't realize was that his index finger was stuck through the hanger hole on the handle end of the wrench. When he let go the wrench almost tore off his finger.
Mann had to walk away; not only to keep Pat from seeing him laugh, but also out of fear that Pat might tear into him next.
Another time, Rosalie remembers Pat getting home late and still having the two cows to milk. Greta offered to go down to the barn with him and help.
"The milk stool Mom used was tippy," Rosalie said, "and she fell backwards while milking the cow." As Greta fell, she pulled too hard on the cows teat which caused the cow to kick over the pail of milk. The milk ran down to Pat's cow which started stomping in the milk and getting Pat covered with a mixture of milk, manure and urine.
"Goddam, Greta, what the hell have you done?" Pat said. But he got up and went to help Greta up - but then he made a mistake when he added, "Damn it, Greta! Can't you even milk a cow?"
That was the last straw for Greta, who also was at the end of a long day. She picked up the tippy stool, threw it at Pat and said, "I'll never be in this barn again." And she wasn't.
Mann Lemons' version of the story has it that Pat then picked up Greta and threw her out a window of the barn into a manure pile. But Rosalie doesn't buy it.
"My Dad," Rosalie said, "was a mean-tempered man, but I never saw him lift a hand to my Mom. Whatever my Mom said, Dad did. He may have gotten mad at her, but he respected her."
Pat Smith said he felt like an outsider in Izee the whole 40 years he was there.
"I wasn't born there and I had to elbow my way in and buy land that others had hoped they'd get for nothing," he said.
Insecure about his own survival and of ever becoming prosperous, Pat didn't want to be beholden to any of his neighbors. He only helped at brandings of the neighbors who he expected to come to his. Of course, everyone else in Izee loved to brand calves and whenever Pat had a branding the whole community would show up.
To be more independent, Pat bought a calf table, a device that holds the calf on its side so that one man can catch the calf, brand, vaccinate, castrate, dehorn and earmark it. All Pat needed was his ranch hand to bring the calves up a chute to the table and maybe a teenage kid to help hold the head.
A tape recording of a visit that Pat had with Jack St. Clair in 1981 revealed that despite feeling like an outsider he did things for the community as well.
"I knew this one thing: a new man going into the community better get along with the people," he said.
That sentiment carried over to the school. The Izee schoolhouse was located on Pat's land. The first schoolhouse had been built there when John Hyde still owned the land. "I never deeded the school one thing," Pat told Jack St. Clair. "I was interested in the schoolhouse in only that there was a decent school there. Whose land the school was on I didn't give a damn."
The people in Izee that Pat liked were the survivors. He got along with Columbus Phillips, his neighbor to the west on Morgan Creek, who, like Pat, was having to claw and scrape for everything he got and he was every bit as gruff as Pat. Pat liked Perry Hyde, his neighbor to the west on Rosebud and Antelope Creeks, who was even more profane than Pat but as Pat said, "Old Perry was as good a neighbor as I had. If you got in a jam he was there to help you out."
Even though Pat didn't like Hamp Officer - "took all of his own grass and a little more, overbearing," he liked Joe and his boys, Wade and Gene - "large family, good people."
"Dad was a hard person to get close to. He was a harsh, stern man but inside, he had a heart of gold," Rosalie said.
Pat's independence stayed with him right up to his last year of ranching in 1973. He'd made a deal to sell the calves and the buyer was at the corral to take delivery. "They wanted a few dinks cut off and so I did but then they wanted a few more cut off for this, and then a few more for that. I said to 'em, 'Screw you - you take 'em the way I bring 'em or you don't take 'em at all. And that was the end of the cutting."
Greta died the next year in 1974. Pat remarried in 1976 to Louise Alford who died in 1998. Pat died in Condon in June of 2002, a bit over 100 years old.
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